Information wants to be free.
That was the rallying cry of the middle-era internet, 1990-2000. Before that, the World Wide Web was a new frontier populated mostly by academics, scientists and nerds, now collectively known as The Liberal Elite, social justice warriors, or special snowflakes because they, you know, read books and stuff.
1991 was the year that America Online rolled out and rolled over the U.S., paving the information superhighway with millions of little floppy disks to get you signed up for FREE! I laugh at millennials with their Tik Toks and Logan Pauls. The AOL chat rooms were like a Million Moron March, encouraging behaviors that were every bit as stupid and narcissistic and anti-social as any modern teen’s Finsta. And we LIKED it that way! Before long, the choices expanded, as any Yahoo could launch a WWW for the whole world to see, good sense and good taste be damned!
During those formative years, most of the people who made the internet go boom still believed that information should be free. It felt like freedom from the real world, where big business made the rules and the government was the enforcer. People all over the world could do anything, say ANYTHING. For a few glorious years, most 12-year-olds in their mothers’ proverbial basements could stay many steps ahead of the newbs in the FBI and corporate legal departments.
Of course, with freedom comes porn. And 2-chan and 4-chan and 8-chan, about as high as most participants on those sites can count. We rationalized stealing a Metallica album on Napster as an act of righteous political dissent. When information is free for all, that includes neo-Nazis and child molestors and eventually even Trump supporters.
Today, 40% of the traffic on the internet flows through Amazon servers. If you don’t think Jeff Bezos is the face of evil, just remember $6 asparagus water at Whole Foods. Facebook and Google together control 58% of digital advertising in the U.S. An ignorant, unhinged fool can use Twitter to become President of The United States, then Twitter can shut him down when it suddenly becomes advantageous for them to do so, after the damage is done. Information wants to be free, but it’s locked in a cage like an immigrant child.
I wasn’t on Parler, but from what I know about the people who signed up, it was clearly a dark and dirty place, where slobbering “patriots” conspired to compensate for their lack of working brain cells by burning down the government. Parler is gone, because Apple, Google and Amazon wanted it gone.
I hate everything the Parler idiots stand for. I mean HATE like can’t sleep at night and doubling my blood pressure medicine just keep my head from actually exploding. Still, do you have a right to believe that Bill Gates wants to inject you with a microchip hidden in your Covid vaccine? Bless your heart, you do have that right. When we start handing control of our free speech to Facebook and Twitter and Amazon, who got us into the mess in the first place, that’s a greater risk to democracy than even a Neanderthal mob blindly following the orders of a disgraced maniac.
BTW, Bill Gates isn’t trying to determine your whereabouts. He, like me, just wants to stay as far away from you as possible.